Buy a town in Southern Nevada
There’s an entire town on the market in rural Southern Nevada; Before the economy crashed there was a queue of buyers.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid’s hometown is a rural community with double-wides and abandoned mines. Some 540 people lived there by 2010.
About 350 people live in Cal-Nev-Ari today, a town about 70 miles south of Las Vegas which is being sold for $8 million.Broker Nancy Kidwell is selling the town, which is mainly land. Some homeowners in the area have their own hangar at the town’s airstrip. Two to five aircraft land there each weekday.
It’s dark and mostly empty in the low-slung, 1960s-era casino here, with a handful of people at the bar and just one or two others playing slots.
The streets in this dusty, isolated town aren’t paved, but there’s almost nothing to drive to, anyway no doctors offices, shopping centers or much else around here.
But there’s plenty of vacant land, and Cal-Nev-Ari’s co-founder is again embarking on a tough but not-unheard-of task in Southern Nevada: selling real estate in the middle of nowhere.
Nancy Kidwell is trying to unload more than 500 acres of mostly vacant land here for $8 million, after her attempts in 2010 to sell for $17 million fell flat. Looking to retire, the 78-year-old is offering most of the town, including its casino, diner, convenience store, 10-room motel, RV park and mile-long dirt airstrip.
Listing broker Fred Marik said the “main thing we’re selling,” however, is land.
“That’s the value,” he said, noting the businesses here are “just breaking even.”
During the bubble years in the past decade, investors bought land in rural towns sprinkled outside Las Vegas for projects that eventually fizzled, including suburban-style subdivisions and a resort designed like a fairy-tale castle. At one point, people even got into a bidding war for Kidwell’s holdings but backed out when the economy crashed.
Today, a sale in Cal-Nev-Ari could bring new life to this hole-in-the-wall community of 350 people, some 70 miles south of Las Vegas off U.S. 95. But without the development craze of yesteryear or skyrocketing land prices pushing builders out of Las Vegas, who would buy property in a place like this?
By all accounts, the pool of prospects is relatively small. It includes people who already own real estate in the area; are willing to gamble on remote, unincorporated towns with little to no growth; or would develop an attraction that lures visitors, according to local brokers who handle these listings.
“It takes a person with some vision,” broker Tony Castrignano said.
Castrignano, owner of Sky Mesa Realty & Capital, is trying to sell the 80-acre town of Nipton, Calif. Owners Jerry and Roxanne Freeman, of Henderson, are seeking $5 million.
Nearly an hour south of the Strip between Interstate 15 and Searchlight, Nipton has a handful of businesses, including a hotel, an RV …